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It’s a hobbit… no, it’s a human… no, it’s a hobbit

THE battle over the “hobbit” that lived 18,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores is taking on epic proportions worthy of The Lord of the Rings.

On one side is Robert Martin of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who says the existence of a species of small-brained dwarf human is a fantasy. Instead, he argues, the fossil is merely a stone-age human with a mild form of microcephaly, a disease which stunts brain development and is associated with small stature. And he says the stone tools found at the site were made by …